How to Stay Aggressive with Your Swimming Goals

From the beginning of the season until that last big race of the year you will experience two different types of motivation when it comes to your goals. Here’s how to make the good one stick so that you can crush it in championship season.

The way we feel during this phase is recognizable, because it’s a lot of fun and we tend to enjoy it. We are focused on our goals, what it’s going to take to achieve it, and we pursue aggressive, optimistic plans in order to make it happen.

We are in the business of building ourselves up into becoming the swimmer we’ve always dreamed of being and business is booming.

But, as our plans start to pan out, and we get closer to achieving our goals (cough-the big meet-cough), we begin to pump the brakes on our aggressiveness.

We get more defensive. We begin to adopt avoidance-oriented tactics. We start acting from a position of not wanting to lose versus wanting to win.

In other words, we slip into the prevention motivation phase.

This phase, is different in the sense that now we are more worried about losing than we are about gaining. We go into loss-prevention mode.

And when it comes to goal setting and motivation, avoidance has been shown to be far less effective when it comes to performance.

How to Stay Aggressive Longer

When you start focusing on the things that are going to go wrong, and get dialed in on not screwing up, your actions eventually follow.

(What you think is what you do. Your actions follow your thoughts.)

The big thing you can do to stay aggressive is to focus on the process and relax.

1. Stay focused on the process.

The closer we get to our goals the more we start to stress about the results.

This stress comes from a deep uncertainty of what will happen, and this stress can completely crater your performance in the pool.

How do we avoid the unnecessary worry and performance-sapping stress? Start by staying within your own performance and not worrying about what others are doing.

About Olivier Poirier-Leroy

Olivier Poirier-Leroy is a former national level swimmer and the author of the books YourSwimBook and Conquer the Pool. He writes all things high-performance swimming, and his articles were read over 3 million times last year. His work has appeared on USA Swimming, SwimSwam, STACK, NBC Universal, and more. He's also kinda tall and can be found on Twitter.